June had listened with interest to John’s feelings about slavery and the South, which encouraged John to lay them out at some length. Suddenly politics dominated the supper table, the women quiet, the men electrified by all the areas of agreement they find. They both support the South, but they also support the Union. They both support the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Although not actually working out as planned, still they both believe it was a step in the right direction. June believes this because he is temperamentally a moderate on all things, John because he sees the abolitionists as the primary problem, with their righteousness, their intolerance, their intransigence. They won’t be happy until every slave in the country is free! Such talk is common around Bel Air, such sentiments widely held. But Asia has not heard this before from John, at least not in this detail. She wonders if Mother minds the implied rejection of Father. She looks to her mother’s face and sees there only the joy of having two of her boys together at the table where she can see and hear and touch them.

June remembers his own miserable days of farming here and is deeply sympathetic to John’s desperation. “It’s a terrible property,” he says. “Always was. Father was mad to ever lease it.” He must see what is plain to all, that they are not thriving. Yet he returns to San Francisco having offered little in the way of assistance.

xi

Then it’s Halloween, season of pranks and prophecy.

The house is filled with friends—Miriam Thatcher, George and Charlotte Mattingly, Edwin’s old friend Sleeper Clarke, William and Michael O’Laughlen, but not their sister Kate, who has never liked Asia, not even when they were little girls playing in the street together, and stayed behind in Baltimore to show it.

The moon rises, pouring its yellow light over the hushed world, and the women send the men away. They unpin their hair, which falls in ripples to their waists. They leave the house, moving as silent as ghosts (though if anyone asked, Rosalie could tell them ghosts are anything but silent), except for the leaves crackling beneath their shoes. Asia leads the way to a hollow tree stump. A recent rain has left small caches of water in the indents of wood. The women wet their fingertips and draw the moisture in a cross on their foreheads. Then they stand in a silent circle and wait for an apparition of the man they will someday marry.